The present disclosure relates to the computer field, especially to a computer startup method, a startup apparatus, a state transition method, and a state transition apparatus.
It is always a problem in the computer field about how to start up a computer system fast. The fast startup of an operating system (OS) comprises a fast BIOS (Basic Input Output System) startup stage and a fast OS load stage. Due to the difference between different operating platforms, it is always a difficult problem to startup BIOS fast.
Currently, the method for starting up BIOS fast comprises the following aspects.
Firstly, codes for a device that does not need to be supported by the computer are removed when starting up. For example, codes for a soft drive are removed in BIOS when it is not necessary to support the soft drive in the system, so that it is not necessary to detect the codes for the soft drive, thereby reducing the startup time. However, the startup speed that can be improved by such method is limited, because there are not too many devices removable for the computer system.
Secondly, the hardware configuration is fixed. For example, the memory configuration is fixed. In this way, it is not necessary to conduct the detection in the startup process. However, still, this startup method cannot improve the startup speed effectively, and this method is only suitable for a computer platform with a fixed configuration.
On the other hand, currently, the OS based on the X86 architecture is very bulky, and the speed for powering on/off is very slow. The long time consumption in the normal powering on/off mode impairs the user experience.
In order to improve the startup speed, multiple modes comprising the S3 mode and the S4 mode are set up in the prior art. In the S3 mode (suspend-on-RAM (STR) mode), the system can recover to the previous mode fast. However, in order to ensure that the system can recover to the previous mode fast, a part of devices, such as the memory, the memory controller, the Platform Controller Hub (PCH), are still in the work state, and thus consume power.
In the S4 mode (suspend-to-disk (STD) mode), data for recovering to the previous state is stored in the hard disk, so the number of the devices that need to be powered is reduced. However, since data needs to be read out from the hard disk and loaded to the memory, the startup time is relatively long.